The Message of Evita

By M. SABEHEDDIN

—

“Evita is untouchable…. Children are born today saying Peron! Evita! Not even the military governments were able to erase that.”
– Mayor Manolo Quindimil (1996)

Evita, the name by which Argentina’s beloved first lady Eva Duarte Peron (1919-1952) was known to the world, is again back in the international media spotlight. Her legendary life now the basis of the film Evita. But the Hollywood production met with national controversy in the land of her birth. “The script by this Englishman attacks our history, offends our dignity and is an insult to the Peronist people,” said Peronist legislator Marta Rivadera. “I am in favour of freedom of expression but am against this lie which will distort the figure of our saint.”

“Evita holds a place in Argentine history equivalent to that of Abraham Lincoln in the United States,” explains Enrique Pavon Pereyra, who knew Evita personally.

During her short life the Argentine working people revered Evita, while the wealthy oligarchs despised her and spread all manner of hateful slanders. Today, some circles still fear the memory of a woman who died forty-five years ago.

Who really was Evita? The message, some say, is important, not the messenger. Today, the life of the messenger Evita Peron is shrouded in myth and legend. What we can know for certain are her thoughts and words recorded for posterity in books and published speeches. By understanding the tremendous vision she shared with her remarkable husband Juan Peron we can grasp something of her timeless greatness.

EVA & JUAN PERON

“When I chose to be Evita, I chose the path of my people.”
– Eva Peron

Evita was born Eva Maria Duarte on May 7 1919 in Los Toldos, Argentina, the fifth and youngest illegitimate child of Juana Ibarguren. Struggling free from a life of grinding poverty she moved to the Argentine capital to find work as a radio soap opera actress.

1943 saw the young Colonel Juan Peron appointed Argentina’s Secretary of Social Welfare and Labour in the military junta of General Farrell. His leadership abilities and determination to radically empower the Argentine working class soon became obvious to all. Peron single-handedly transformed the labour movement and strengthened the unions. As his popularity grew – he was appointed vice president and Minister of War – opposition from reactionary elements in the armed forces and the wealthy land-owning class also grew.

1944 found Evita working as a radio actress and commentator on Argentina’s leading radio station in Buenos Aires. A year earlier she had reached the top of her profession and was among the highest paid radio actresses in the country. Evita later described her work on radio as a combination of singer, disc-jockey, actress and lady commentator all in one. These were the glory days of radio when people relied on the airwaves to deliver news and comment along with entertainment.

On Saturday, January 15 1944, an earthquake destroyed the ancient Argentine town of San Juan, claiming the lives of over ten thousand people. Col. Peron distinguished himself in organising the relief effort. Evita, already greatly interested in social welfare, attended a meeting of artists called by Peron to raise funds for the rebuilding of the town.

Peron described the meeting at which a young woman, then unknown to him, boldly spoke out:

“I remember that she wasn’t seated in the first row; that she was wearing a very simple dress; that she was thin, that she had blonde hair, and that she had a little hat, like they wore in those days. ‘We don’t need festivals,’ she replied to proposals that had been made, ‘we should go directly to ask, without offering anything….Let’s go to the streets, to the public places, to the hippodrome, to the theatre, to all the important places, and say to the people, our brothers are stricken, we have to help them! We have to get money from those that have it, because those that don’t have it can’t give it.’

“I liked the way this woman thought and worked. I thought she wasn’t like the others. She had something very superior to the others in the way she talked and in her suggestions. She was practical and had new ideas.

“‘Good, very well,’ I said to her then, ‘it’s your idea, organize it.’ And that’s the way it was. She organized everything.”

In another recollection, Peron told how he was struck by Evita’s zeal and conviction. “I looked at her and felt that her words were overpowering me….I saw in Evita an exceptional woman. A true passion, animated by will and by a faith comparable to that of any of the early Christians.”

Evita shared Juan Peron’s commitment to social justice. Peron saw in Evita a kindred spirit and co-worker in the struggle for a revitalised Argentine nation. “When I first knew Evita what attracted me to her was not the beautiful woman but the good woman,” Peron later wrote. “It’s true that she combined those two things: beauty and goodness. Instinctively I perceived that the collaboration of a woman of this kind would be invaluable for the social task I had in mind….I had to prepare a woman who would be the feminine leader of my political movement: a capable woman with enough basic culture, natural talents of intuition, with dedication…”

On her daily radio programmes Evita dramatically recounted Peron’s welfare reforms. They were a passionate mix of radio drama and current affairs. One of her most popular broadcasts went on at seven in the evening, when men and women were together after work. Evita explained to her listeners all about “that newcomer in the Ministry of Social Welfare”. She obtained records from Peron’s deputies and office secretaries and brought the story of the fast rising military officer and his vision, to the masses.

Looking back on this hectic period Peron recalled “…our private life [was] totally subordinated to the political and social calling…a veritable tyranny to which we submitted ourselves as if it were a mission. Evita, in those first days, didn’t care much about her appearance, or want to be taken for an elegant woman. She went to work, and working all day didn’t leave much time to care for herself.”

As Peron’s influence and mass support grew, Argentina’s reactionary ruling class started a campaign of vilification aimed at undermining his popularity. He was openly living with Evita, and in a staunchly Catholic country, this provided ammunition for his enemies. Professor Robert D. Crassweller in his book on Peron, points out:

“Evita’s image as a prostitute, strongly held in some quarters, was one consequence although it had no basis in fact. But it served well the sense of class antipathy and division that was growing up around Peron, and in a society so deeply fragmented and so hotly personalized any weapon that came to hand was welcome.”1

By 1945 the forces of U.S. imperialism, alarmed at the course of developments in Argentina, formulated a policy to derail the growing anti-Yankee, anti-British, nationalist-labour coalition inspired by Juan Peron. Spruille Braden, whose family made their fortune exploiting Chile’s natural resources, became United States ambassador to Argentina. A protege of Nelson Rockefeller, Braden’s job was to guarantee Argentina’s compliance with the goals of U.S. imperialism in South America.

The U.S. ambassador had several explosive meetings with Peron. Unable to persuade the Argentine vice president to accept Washington’s demands, Braden openly intervened in Argentina’s internal affairs, giving speeches to audiences of Peron’s opponents, and publicly criticizing Peron. Part of this U.S. instigated disinformation campaign smeared Peron as a fascist and ‘Nazi agent’. “North Americans are the greatest criminals and thieves in the history of the world”, wrote Juan Peron.

Events came to ahead in October. Reactionary army officers led by an insignificant general insanely jealous of Peron, staged a coup. On October 12th, Peron was ousted from all his government posts and arrested by the pro-U.S. clique. With Peron exiled to an island prison, the self-appointed cabinet officers set about organising their own regime. They had reckoned without Evita, and they underrated the support of the working people for Peron.

On the boat to the prison island, Col. Peron turned to the officer guarding him. “Well, I lost,” he said. “But, you know, there is only one person for whom I need to care. I am your prisoner but I am also your fellow army officer. May I ask you a favour?”

“What is it, Colonel Peron?” the officer asked. “Give a pistol to Evita for me – to defend herself or to kill herself if someone touches her. Tell her I will not live after her….”

When word spread of Peron’s imprisonment, Evita started organising their bands of working class supporters, the descamisados or “shirtless ones”, with furious speed.

Evita rallied the labour unions and all who listened in a popular uprising that would forever change Argentina. Evita told the union leaders: “Look, this is not just our chance, it is your last chance to create a new social order, or we can all go back to the old social order.”

As the Argentine masses realised what had happened to Peron, riots broke out all over Buenos Aires and other provincial cities. By October 17 the Argentine capital was almost in the hands of organised bands of descamisados. More than half a million people, led by over fifty thousand labourers, gathered in front of Government House, demanding “our leader, Peron.”

Fearing bloody civil war, the military promptly released Peron and he appeared before the crowds on the Government House balcony. On October 23 he secretly married Evita. Then began his campaign for the presidency.

In a desperate attempt to destroy Peron’s presidential bid, the U.S. State Department issued the notorious “Blue Book,” a scandalous report officially entitled Consultation among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation. Containing all the false charges generated by Ambassador Braden, the “Blue Book” was a vicious piece of propaganda. The agents of U.S. imperialism went to work massively publicising its charges. Half the space of many newspapers – with newsprint scarce – was devoted to reprints from it.

PERON’S VICTORY

“The reign of the bourgeoisie has terminated throughout the world. The government of the peoples begins. With that, demi-liberalism and its consequence, capitalism, has ended its cycle; the future belongs to the people.”
– Juan Peron

Despite the calculated disinformation of the U.S. State Department’s “Blue Book” and Ambassador Braden’s intrigues, Peron emerged victorious, following the first honest election in Argentina in decades. There was rejoicing in the streets that night of February 24 1946, as Peronist representatives gained an overwhelming majority in the Chamber of Deputies and almost all the seats in the Senate.

In a direct move against the iniquitous Anglo-American financial interests, Peron nationalised the Central Bank of Argentina one day before the election. Two years later he referred to this move in a speech: “Nationalisation has been, without doubt, the most transcendent financial measure of the last fifty years.”

“Is it true that you represent a new doctrine?” the Associated Press reporter asked Peron after the 1946 election. To which Peron replied, “Yes, in effect, but not so new as forgotten for a long time, because it is already 2,000 years old: Christianity.” His new government immediately launched a “social programme of a revolutionary nature.”

The new Argentine president enacted legislation establishing labour councils to protect workers from arbitrary dismissal, reduced the working week to forty-four hours, raised wages, nationalised the British owned railway system and established free health clinics for the poor.

Evita’s total devotion to the ideals of Peronism impressed all who heard her spell-binding, stirring oratory. From her quiet opening, modestly referring to herself as Peron’s little echo, she told her audience: “I was no better off than you not long ago. Now I exist only to interpret Peron’s great crusade to you – his people. I am only here to save his energy, to explain his ideals, to carry out his glorious programme….”

The new government granted women the right to vote in 1947 and eighteen months later Evita organised the Peronist Women’s Party. Meaningless feminist theories did not interest her. Her actions did more, in the words of one observer, “to bring women into public life in Argentina than a large army of feminists could have done.” In an early speech, Juan Peron paid tribute to the many women, inspired by Evita, who joined the Peronist ranks:

“This Revolution has been echoed by Argentine womanhood as few events in history have ever been. This is indeed auspicious, for if man is a rationalist, woman possesses what is above masculine rationalism; an intuition which is always superior to the success we men may be able to attain. For this reason I render homage to the women of my country in whom the men of the Revolution found an echo that fills us with satisfaction and pride.”

Evita Peron was a legend well before her death. Her autobiographical La Razon de Mi Vida (“My Mission in Life”), written in late 1951, after she learned that she had cancer, was a best seller in Argentina and abroad. Some 50 million copies were printed, 150 000 copies selling on the first day of publication. An Arabic edition was distributed in Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean. Wherever people were rising up to confront imperialism, Evita’s book appeared.

In La Razon de Mi Vida she vents her anguish at the injustice suffered by the poor at the hands of the oligarchs. A strong sense of the evils of bourgeois capitalism and crusading zeal for social justice were inseparable from Evita’s personality. She wrote:

“I remember well that I was sad for many days when I discovered there were wealthy people as well as poor people in the world; and the strange fact is that I didn’t resent so much the existence of poor people as I did to discover there were also rich. The theme of rich against the poor, has been, since then, my sole concern in my deepest solitude.” Throughout her years with the Argentine president, Evita always scrutinised all government policies regarding worker’s rights and social welfare.

“It is distressing to compel men to live in an unjust world,” Juan Peron once lamented. With Evita by his side, he tirelessly laboured to build a new nation “in which every part of Argentine society should contribute its share for the benefit of the community: the worker, his muscles; the middle class, its intelligence and activity; the rich, their money….”2

The Argentine leader exposed the principle of unbridled liberty in the economic sphere, remarking: “We do not favour unilateral liberty where the rich are free to do whatever they like while the poor have but one liberty: to die of hunger.

“It is necessary to end the economy of exploitation and replace it by a social economy without exploiters or exploited and where each one receives a just payment in accordance with his capacity and effort. Capital must be at the service of economy and not economy at the service of international capitalism as has occurred up to now.”

The 1949 Argentine National Constitution, inspired by Peron’s ideas, stipulated that it is the duty of the State to supervise the distribution and use of land and intervene in order to develop and increase its yield for the good of the community. The State must give each peasant or his family the possibility of becoming the owner of the land he cultivates. Capital must be at the service of national economy and its main object must be social welfare. The different forms of exploitation cannot oppose the ends of public welfare of the Argentine people.

EVA PERON FOUNDATION

“…Peronism, which perhaps at times doesn’t respect the forms but which tries to assimilate and comply with the principles, is an effective, real, and deep way of practising Christianity…”
– Juan Peron

Evita made part of her grand vision a reality through the Eva Peron Foundation, a charity organisation that distributed over $50 million a year to the poor and needy. The foundation avoided the quagmire of government bureaucracy by relating directly to the people. As Evita explained:

“It was Peron himself who told me: ‘The people who have been deeply punished by injustice have more confidence in people than in institutions. In this, more than in anything else, I fear the bureaucracy. In government it is necessary to have a lot of patience and to know how to wait for everything to move. But in the works of social assistance you cannot ask anybody to wait.’”3

In the first eleven months of Peron’s presidency, Evita gave away close to $4,500,000 worth of school books, clothes, shoes, furniture, toys, and food, to those in need. Prof. Crassweller explains:

“With such singleness of direction, the foundation flourished as none other. By the end of the 1940s it exceeded, in size, in influence, and in general significance, most of the ministries of the government. Its assets exceeded $200 million. It had 14,000 permanent employees, including thousands of construction workers and a staff of priests. It acquired for distribution to the poor fantastic amounts of supplies….Its flood of revenues came from many sources. Labor unions donated cash and goods made in the factories where members worked.”4

Evita built more schools, orphanages, hospitals and retirement homes than all previous Argentine governments combined. Prof. Crassweller conveys the sheer enormity and range of the foundation’s work:

“Twelve hospitals, with the best equipment available anywhere, were built. A thousand new schools appeared. There were clinics, medical centers, homes for the aged, convalescent centers, a home for girls who had come to Buenos Aires looking for work, transit homes for those needing temporary shelter, student cities, children’s homes, including a famous Children’s City built to the scale of its inhabitants, with small markets, a church, public buildings, a bank that issued script, streets, houses, and dormitories for four hundred and fifty particularly disadvantaged children. The foundation also built the Barrio Presidente Peron, a development with six hundred new houses just west of Buenos Aires, and it built Evita City, a planned community with 15,000 homes. Many of the public structures were notable for a tone of luxury unfamiliar in such places, a touch of brocade and damask and crystal, and this was deliberate, a form of social recompense.”

As if painfully conscious of her own mortality, Evita was “working through the day and through much of the night, at a pace the human body cannot long tolerate.” She did not smoke. Like her husband she drank no alcohol, only water. Just as the Christians in ancient Rome died for Christ, Evita reminded the Peronist faithful, “We, who love Peron more than anything, are going to die for Peron, because we are not defending a personal thing, but a national cause.”5

Juan Peron, after only three years in office, had made Argentina the fourth industrial power in the world. Land reforms boosted agricultural production and the Argentine Institute for Trade Promotion set the price of Argentina’s booming exports. The development of a national economy resulted in vast public works projects, bringing economic prosperity. By 1949, Peron’s doctrine was summed up in the word Justicialismo, a term coined from the Spanish words for “social” and “justice”. Justicialismo, the ideology of Peronism, being officially defined as “a doctrine whose object is the happiness of man within the society of mankind through the harmonizing of material, spiritual, individual and collective forces, appraised from the Christian standpoint.”

JUSTICE & CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM

“I have always thought that above all material values are the permanent values of spirit, which are the only eternal things.”
– Juan Peron

“Justicialism”, Peron proclaimed, “is nothing but national Christian socialism.” Above all, the goal of Justicialismo was to transform the Argentine masses into an “organised community” in which conflicting interests would be brought into harmony.

Evita Peron clearly defined the difference between an organised community and a dispersed mass by comparing Spartans with Helots. The former constituted a great people with conscience, personality and social organisation, while the latter lacked those three qualities and lived as slaves.

“The history of Peronism,” said Evita, “is already a long battle of seven years to have a suffering and sweating mass – as General Peron many times called it – become a people with social conscience, personality and organisation.

“You must remember how many times General Peron addressed workers, industrialists, merchants, professionals, everybody, asking them to organise themselves.

“Peron wants a people which feels and thinks, which acts properly guided. For this reason he set three objectives: social justice, economic independence and political sovereignty.

“Peron wants a united people, because then nobody will exploit it, nor will it be defeated by any other force in the world. Peron wants a people where everybody is privileged.”6

The United States faced the problem of what to do about Peron. His legally won 1946 election, after the publication and distribution of the “Blue Book”, was an open defeat of United States diplomacy in Latin America. The U.S. could not afford to openly oppose Peron, at the possible cost of Latin American solidarity. Washington chose instead to try to publicly live with the “Peron problem”, while simultaneously carrying on covert operations designed to undermine and discredit the Peronist revolution.

Peron understood the real nature of the international forces arrayed against him. He saw how the British and U.S. imperialists had actually used the Argentine Communist Party to oppose his labour-nationalist coalition. The Communists broke up strikes in the railways and meat packing plants (owned by Anglo-American interests) and strenuously fought the anti-imperialist descamisados. “For capitalist oligarchy a communist party is better than a Justicialist enemy,” declared a popular Peronist slogan of the era.

The globalist forces, so hostile to nationalism and responsible for the division of the world between capitalism and communism, Peron termed: “the Great Internationals of Sinarchy.”7

Sinarchy is a type of collective shadow world government that brings together the highest leaders of the big imperialist powers. The Argentine leader said that “Masonry, Zionism, international societies of different kinds are but a consequence of the globalisation of the present world. They are the hidden forces of imperialist domination.”8

“Capitalism and Soviet Communism are but two of them,” Peron observed, “seemingly opposed but in reality perfectly united and co-ordinated.

“Everything can be summarized by saying that the capitalist regime has abused property and is to blame for communism because it has given it a reason to exist. Without the exaggerated exploitation of the old capitalist regime, communism would never have existed. That is the cause, and communism is the effect. In order to remove the effect, it is necessary to remove the cause.”9

Re-elected by an even greater margin in 1951, Peron continued to reshape Argentina. Reviewing the achievements of his presidency in the face of opposition from Britain and the U.S., Peron wrote:

“During the ten years of Justicialist Government [1945-55] Argentina was free and sovereign. Nobody poked their noses with impunity. But at the end of those ten years, international sinarchy, together with vernacular politicians at the service of foreign interests and colonialism, treaded on us.”

A NATION MOURNS

“I pray God that He should not allow these madmen to lift their hand against Peron, for on that day, woe to them! I shall go forth with the working people, I shall go forth with the women of the people, I shall go forth with the descamisados, and I shall leave no brick standing that is not Peronist.”
– Evita Peron, May 1 1952

Evita tirelessly carried on her work at the foundation, but now she was dying of cancer. At first resistant to treatment of any kind, she accepted the inevitability of surgery.

On May 7 1951, a little more than twelve months before her death, Evita declared:

“Peron is the air we breathe; Peron is our sun, Peron is life. I want nothing but to be the heart of Peron. Because, though I do my best to understand him and learn his marvellous ways, whenever he makes a decision, I barely mumble. Whenever he speaks, I hardly utter a single word. Whenever he gives advice, I scarcely dare make a suggestion. What he sees I hardly glimpse. But I see him with the eyes of my soul….And I have pledged myself to collect the hopes of the Argentine people and empty them in the marvellous heart of Peron so that he may turn them into realities.

“The humble people, my general, have come here to prove, as they have always done, that the miracle that happened 2,000 years ago is occurring again. The rich, the learned, the men in power never understood Christ. It was the humble and the poor who understood, because their souls, unlike the souls of the rich, are not sealed up with avarice and selfishness.”

Argentina’s powerful Catholic Church, traditionally aligned with Peron’s enemies the oligarchs, did not approve. The Church hierarchy was already upset by Peron and Evita’s interest in the esoteric sciences and the intrusion of the Eva Peron Foundation into education and youth affairs.

Evita responded to the Church’s disapproval explaining: “Once I read in a book by Leon Bloy, about Napoleon, that he could not conceive heaven without his Emperor. This appealed to me and in a speech I said that I also could not conceive heaven without Peron.

“Some people thought that this was almost a heresy. Nevertheless, every time I think of it, it seems more logical to me.

“I know that God alone will fill heaven.

“But God, who could not conceive heaven without His mother, whom He liked so much, will forgive me because my heart cannot conceive it without Peron.

“I shall not commit the heresy to compare him (Peron) to Christ…but I am certain that, by imitating Christ, Peron feels a deep love for humanity and that this, more than anything else, makes him great, magnificently great.”10

Evita continued to decline. On June 4 1952 she rallied for a last appearance in public at Peron’s inauguration for a second term. She now weighed only eighty pounds. Later in June, she endured radiotherapy, was burned, and suffered much.

To the end Evita’s concern was for her beloved General. “As she lay in bed on a bad day toward the end, more dead than alive, Peron walked by in the corridor beyond her door, coughing as he passed. ‘Did you hear that?’ she said to her doctor. ‘General Peron is coughing, because he smokes too much. Please, tell him not to smoke. Examine him. See that he doesn’t get sick.’”11

During her last weeks, Evita wrote her public will. When she died on July 26 1952, at age 33, the nation was in shock. She never held any official post but had become the most famous and beloved woman in the world. The largest funeral in the history of the Argentine was held with millions of mourners lining the streets as her coffin passed with full military honours.

On October 17, the anniversary of her 1945 mass rallies to free Peron, a day set aside to honour “Evita, Spiritual Chief of the Nation,” Evita’s public will was read to the people. It began: “I wish to live eternally with Peron and with my people. This is my absolute and permanent desire, and therefore my last will. Where Peron is and where my descamisados are, there will my heart ever be, to love them with all the forces of life and all the fanaticism that burns my soul.”

She continued: “I will be with them, with Peron, to fight against the traitorous and perfidious oligarchy, against the cursed race of exploiters and the dealers in humanity….if I have committed errors, I have committed them out of love and I hope that God, who has always seen into my heart, will judge me not for my errors, nor for my defects, nor for my guilt, but for the love that consumes my life.

“I…was born of the people and suffered with them. I have the body and the soul and the blood of the people. I can do nothing other than to surrender myself to my people.”

Evita passed from the scene of history, a great and truly unique woman for whom no counterpart can be discerned.

In 1955 Juan Peron was overthrown by pro-Anglo-American military officers and forced to leave the country. As one commentator wrote of his years away from Argentina: “In exile, Peron had continued to espouse the basic tenets of his political creed: hatred of bourgeois capitalism and all forms of imperialism; advocacy of the Third World causes (such as economic independence), which he so early championed and of which he now calls himself the father; and government with and for, if not by, the people.”12

Returning in 1973 to an Argentina in political and economic chaos, Peron was reelected to the presidency with 67% of the vote. After only nine months in office Peron died and joined his beloved Evita.

“Yes. I confess I have an ambition, one sole and great personal ambition: I would like that the name of Evita would appear someday in the history of my country. I would like that it would say of Evita, even if it would not be more than a small footnote, at the end of the wonderful chapter which history will certainly dedicate to Peron, something approximately like this: ‘There was, by the side of Peron, a woman who dedicated herself to take to the President the hopes of the people, which Peron would promptly convert into realities.’ And I would feel properly and fully repaid if the footnote would end like this: ‘Of that woman we only know that the people used to call her, caressingly, EVITA.’”13